To ask the question posed by the title of this chapter is, in effect, nearly the same as asking "Why should I buy a book about running a Web server on VMS?" So if you're standing in the aisle at a bookstore trying to make up your mind, read on. The answers are different depending on whether you're considering starting up a huge Web-based enterprise from scratch, looking to add Web access to the data you already have, or running a hobbyist site. If you're starting up a huge Web-based enterprise, you might want to show this chapter to your management.

The reasons to choose VMS as a Web platform if you're starting from scratch include reliability, availability, stability, scalability, security, and ease of administration, all of which boil down to VMS and VMS clustering technology. Clusters were invented for VMS and have been available on that operating system since the 1980s. Other operating systems are starting to catch up, but VMS clustering capability continues to be developed and will probably retain its technological lead for some time to come.

1.1 VMS clustering

If you absolutely, positively must have access to your data all the time, you can get that capability with VMS-based computers. With VMS cluster technology and shareable RAID storage, multiple systems can access your databases or plain files simultaneously, with access arbitrated at a fine-grained level by the distributed lock manager. If you're set up with volume shadowing, losing a physical disk still leaves you with an...